Monday, May 27, 2013

In the dwindling days of Short Story Month and my “Puzzle
the Prof” contest for 2013 , Richard Pangburn has asked my opinion of Rick
Bass’s “The Hermit’s Story.” I am happy
to oblige, for I like the story very much.
For those who have not read it, let me provide a brief summary before I
comment on it.

“The Hermit’s Story,” a magical tale about the entry into an
alternate reality, begins with a sort of poetic overture about the blue color
of an ice storm. The narrator and his
wife have gone to the home of Ann and Roger for Thanksgiving dinner. The power is out, and after the two couples
eat pie and drink wine before a roaring fire, Ann tells a story about an
experience she had twenty years before up in Saskatchewan with a man named Gray
Owl who hired Ann to train six German shorthair pointers.

After Ann has trained the dogs all summer and into the fall,
she takes them back to Gray Owl to show him how to continue to work them. She and Gray Owl take the dogs out into the
snow, and Ann uses live quail to show Gray Owl how the dogs will follow the
birds and point them. They work the
dogs for a week until they get lost in a heavy snowstorm, drifting away from
their home area by as much as ten miles.
When they come to a frozen lake and Gray Owl walks out on its surface
and kicks at it to find some water for the dogs, he abruptly disappears below
the ice.

Ann decides to go into the water after Gray Owl, for even if
he is already drowned, he has their tent and emergency rations. However, when she crawls out on the ice and
peers down into the hole where Gray Owl disappeared, she sees standing him
below waving at her. When he helps her
down, he says that what has happened is that a cold snap in October has frozen
a skin of ice over the shallow lake and then a snowfall insulated it. When the lake drained in the winter, the ice
on top remained. Ann goes back to the
shore and hands the dogs down into the warmth created by the enclosed space
beneath the ice.

The world under the ice is a magical one, the air unlike
anything they have ever breathed before. The cold air from the hole they made
meets with the warm air from the earth beneath the lake to create breezes. Although the ice above them contracts and
groans, they feel they are safe beneath a sea watching waves of starlight sweep
across their hiding place. When they
build a fire from cattails, small pockets of swamp gas ignite with explosions
of brilliance.

The two head for what they hope is the southern shore, the
dogs chasing and pointing snipe and other birds. They finally reach the other shore and walk south for a half a
day until they reach their truck. That
night they are back at Gray Owl’s cabin, and by the next night Ann is home
again. The story ends with the narrator considering that Ann is the only one
who carries the memory of that underworld passage. He thinks that it perhaps gave her a model for what things are
like for her dogs when they are hunting and enter a zone where the essences of
things.

When “The Hermit’s
Story,” appeared in the 1999 Best American Short Stories collection,
Rick Bass said in his contributor’s note that as soon as he heard about a
frozen lake with no water in it, he knew he wanted to write a story about
that. Because he was trying to train
two bird dogs at the time, he made up a bird-dog trainer as a sort of wish
fulfillment and had her go up to Canada and fall into such a lake.

Such an event alone, as dramatically potential as it might
be, does not, of course, make a story.
What makes the event a story is Bass’s exploration of the symbolic
significance of the magical world into which the characters enter. That magical world is presaged even before
they break through the ice with the blue world of the ice storm described by
the narrator in the opening paragraphs in which the blue is like a scent
trapped in the ice. It is further
emphasized by the fact that the storm has knocked out the electricity, creating
a world of darkness. In the midst of
this cold, blue, dark world, the two couples sit before a fire, creating the
classic setting for a story to be told.

When Ann and Gray Wolf work the dogs in the snow of
Saskatchewan, they travel across snowy hills, the sky the color of snow so that
it seems they are moving in a dream.
Except for the rasp of the snowshoes and the pull of gravity, they might
believe they had ascended into a sky-place where the entire world was
snow. All this is preparation for their
descent into the improbable, magical world underneath the frozen lake. When they look up, the ice is clear, and
they can see stars as if they were up there among them or else as if the stars
were embedded in the ice.

The closest the narrator can come to articulating the
meaning of the experience is to suggest that it perhaps was a zone where the
appearances of things disappeared, where surfaces faded away and instead their
very essence was “revealed, illuminated, circumscribed, possessed.” Much like a magical journey in a fairy tale,
the experience under the ice is a journey into a realm of dream and desire, which
suggests that the world is a much more magical and mysterious place than we
usually think.

Style is especially important to this story, for without
Bass’s poetic descriptions, his rhythmic prose, and his suggestions about the
mythic significance of the experience it would be merely an interesting
anecdote, depending solely on the unusual nature of the frozen empty lake. The opening paragraph, by repeating the
reference to the color blue and the fictional metaphoric phrase “as if,” sets
up the entry into the fairy tale world.
This “as if” metaphoric quality also is used to refer to Ann’s
transformation of the dogs from wild and unruly pups into well-trained hunting
dogs, “as if” they are rough blocks of stone with their internal form existing
already, waiting to be chiseled free.
If the training is neglected, they have a tendency to revert to their
old selves, “as if” the dogs’ greatness can disappear back into the stone.

Although often metaphoric, Bass’s style is not flowery, but
rather simple and straightforward. He
does not tell the story in Ann’s words, but rather has the narrator retell it,
thus filtering the story through two points of view. Neither Ann nor Gray Owl talk much during their experience, and
when they do it is in the simple straightforward language of people reduced to
basic states. In telling Ann about the
lake, he says “It’s not really a phenomenon; it’s just what happens.” And when she asks if he knew it would be
like this, he says, “No. I was looking
for water. I just got lucky.” Although there is no indication, other than
his name, that Gray Owl is Native American, his dialogue reflects the common
literary convention of having Native Americans speak in short declarative
sentences.

Bass, a naturalist who has written nonfiction books about
the Yaak Valley in Montana, also devotes much of the story to his fascination
with the natural world of, as well as the dogs and the birds they hunt. For example, when the birds flush out snipe
from the cattails underneath the ice, Bass spends at least two pages pondering
the presence of the birds, wondering if they had been unable to migrate because
of injuries or a genetic absence.

With the curiosity of the naturalist, he wonders if the
snipe had tried to carve out new ways of being in the stark and severe
landscape, holding on until the spring would come like green fire. If the snipe survived, the narrator reckons,
they would be among the first to see the spring; they would think that the torches
of Ann and Gray Owl were merely one of winter’s dreams.

The fairy-tale, folklore nature of the story persists
throughout, with the narrator considering at the end that Ann holds on to her
experience as one might hold on to a valuable gem found while out for a walk
and thus containing some great magic or strength.

8 comments:

I heard this story for the first time this evening. It was read aloud at a monthly event we hold in this little Rust Belt village in Upstate NY, "Story Time for Grownups." Our reader was a local college professor. The audience was small. We were in a bakery cafe, a genial setting (and a little financial windfall for the proprietor, considering there wouldn't normally be customers on such a cold night, midweek).

The description of the world under the lake struck me the most. Peering through the ice at the moon outside and so far away. The cattail torches and occasional methane flares. The "strange smell of the air."

I looked around the room in those moments and everyone was in a dream, envisioning, sniffing, touching, listening.

Back home, I decided to google the story so I could share it with others who were not able to attend tonight's event. Which is how I found your blog.

Riddle me this, though: why is it called "The Hermit's Story," do you suppose? Neither narrator is a hermit.

The double layer of narration reminded me a bit of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The answer to the question, why is Rick Bass's story called "The Hermit's Story" might be found in the conclusion when the narrator says that Ann has dreams about being beneath the ice, about living beneath the ice, for it seemed to her as if she were down there for years.

The narrator says he suspects that being under the ice gave her a "model" for what the world must be like for her dogs when they go into a trance on the hunt, that blue zone, which the narrator describes at the opening of the story. It is a zone where the mere appearance or surface of things disappears and their essences are revealed.

It may very well be that all story tellers are "hermits" who cut them off from the mere appearance of things and enter into a realm of meaning and significance.

It is a happy coincidence that today I was reading an interview with Alice Munro, who said that when she is in that zone, mere physical things seem to mean something way beyond themselves. She says that sometimes this leaves her and physical objects begin to look as if they are just constructed out of material. "They don't mean anything but what they seem to mean. When she cannot see things with a sort of rim of significance around them, she becomes depressed.

However, she says she usually does see things as being significant and meaningful, and it has nothing to do with things being ugly or beautiful. "There's a difference between the person and the writer." The example she gives is that being the person she is, living across from a beautiful wood, she would get upset if bulldozers came and knocked the trees down and put up a Texaco station. But the writer in her would not get upset. The writer would start watching what was going on at the Texaco station.

So, maybe when one tells a story about something mysterious that one intuits has meaning and significance and is trying to see into the essence of that thing or story, maybe inevitably the storyteller becomes a hermit in a sort of spiritual retreat. Thus, Ann is a hermit and so is Rick Bass--that is, when they are not being merely people but are being writers or storytellers.

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."